We, who live in Lancaster County, respect these plain folks most profoundly. They are our neighbors and we find them good neighbors. They have made a contribution to our agriculture, greater than their numbers warrant, to make our county the richest non-irrigated agricultural county in America. They are a peace loving people whom you do not find in the courts either as prosecutors or defendants. All they ask of you and me is to be let alone to lead their lives in the light as God has given it to them to see the light. The Pennsylvania Dutch Language By DR. J. WILLIAM FREY _Chairman of the Department of German and Russian at Franklin and Marshall College_ We bisht? We gaits? (How are you? How goes it?) That’s the familiar greeting throughout the length and breadth of the Pennsylvania Dutch country. This is symbolic of the relative sameness of the Pennsylvania Dutch tongue no matter where you go in southeastern Pennsylvania or, in fact, anywhere else a Dutchman has happened to wander. This is linguistically and culturally a unique phenomenon. Travel in any European country—staying away from the large cities—and you will find almost mutually unintelligible dialects spoken from one community to the next, a mere dozen or so miles away. These wide language divergencies reflect vast cultural-historical differences, deep-rooted in tradition and folkways. But in the Pennsylvania Dutchland—whether you visit the Amish on their unparalleled farms of Lancaster County or whether you call on the Church groups (Lutheran and Reformed) located almost directly north of Philadelphia—you will find Pennsylvania Dutch spoken and understood with only enough differences to make it interesting. In fact, there is not nearly so much difference in the pronunciation and vocabulary and idioms of one brand of Pennsylvania Dutch from another as there is, say, between the native speech of a Bostonian and that of a Charlestonian!